The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  The stench of tomato sauce baked into Ta-Kome’s back room’s linoleum floor and sheetrock walls fouled the air. He had skipped supper. He never ate when he worried about people he loved and he loved Silvy’s brother as the kid brother he never had. When Judge “Send ’em South” Sadowski sentenced Badger’s dad to ten to twenty to be served in Walpole on trumped up charges of armed robbery and criminal mayhem, Mabi became Badger’s surrogate father. Together they grooved on Boston Celtic basketball games, cheering for Jo Jo, Tall Paul, and Charlie Scott, but never Big Red or Hondo. The Celtics, he told Badger, were the first NBA team to break the color line, first to start five brothers, first to have a black coach. He missed those Celtics, the Celtics of his boyhood, the Jones boys, Satch, Russ, some afterthought white-asses. He missed his Bill Russell poster, rolled in a cardboard tube, stored in a box he’d never unpack, but it was a poster from a different lifetime, a different person’s lifetime, a lifetime which had reached its ajal. He resented today’s Celtics and its reliance on great white hopes to win championships. The advent of Larry Bird as their next super star savior hardened his attitude. Beauty in his mind was not skin deep.

  Mabi cradled a can of root beer, fiddling with the straw, trapping soda, releasing it, trapping, releasing, trapping, releasing. Knowing Spider and Scorpion were riding shotgun for Badger did not calm his worries. His fingertips beat on the lid of the can as if possessed by Shaytān. Fucking al-Saffah, he thought. I’m as controlled as this fucking soda. He sucks me in when he wants to suck me in, blows me out when he wants to blow me out. Mabi didn’t understand why the soda didn’t drain from the straw when he sealed it with his fingertip any more than he understood why he became Mabi or how his life became trapped inside the pages of some book like a bookmark abandoned by an itinerate preacher who’d lost interest in the text. If he could skip to the end of the story . . . , but he didn’t have no one to turn the pages. He flung the can across the storeroom, a storm of root beer raining down everywhere.

  “Shit,” Bugle, the counterman, said. “That soda be ‘sugaring a carpet of ants.”

  Mabi sat stone still while Bugle wiped up the root beer with a towel, then sponged down the floor with a mop.

  “Yo, Mabi!” Badger had duck-walked into the storeroom after intercepting the rabbi. “When I told rabbi man our eyes burning holes in his back . . .”

  “Any trouble?” Mabi asked Spider.

  “Just the trouble we made,” Spider said. “Seen this?” He handed Mabi a copy of the first edition of Saturday’s Herald-American. MATZOH MURDER! in block letters headlined the front page. Above the masthead, the paper claimed an exclusive: Why Bumper Sullivan had to die! Spider opened to page two. “Al-Saffah says Jews needing Bumper’s blood to bake shit called matzoh.”

  “Sweet to the tongue, sour to the stomach,” Bugle said.

  “Home time for you,” Mabi told Badger.

  “Better let me wheel this baby home,” Spider said.

  “When Silvy heard I doing Trojan business,” Badger said, “she told me she not keeping your company no more. You’re so deep inside her shit your head sticking out her butt crack.”

  Mabi grabbed Badger and lifted him off the floor. “Don’t fucking talk like that ’bout your sister.” He dropped Badger who crumbled to the floor like a carcass that had been deboned. He kneeled and glared down at Badger. “Rats be lapping up your blood I hear you talk that way again.”

  Silvy’s put-down stung him worse than fire crawling up and down his cock. The last time he was so deep in Silvy’s shit was after al-Saffah sliced and diced his cock and it was too sore, the wound too raw, to take care of her needs. She pouted about his loss of interest in her, accusing him of fucking snow bunnies or sack chasers or going fag. The way she lowered her eyes and puffed up her lips aroused him; but erections still ached and he knew making love would hurt worse than a steel wool rubdown.

  “Why you let him do you like that?” she had asked.

  “To get holy. How many years you been begging me to get holy?”

  “Nobody but Jews gets their cocks cut up like that.”

  “And Muslims.” Maybe, he had thought at the time, Silvy’s ajal had come. Maybe she had been written out of the pages of his book. Maybe she was nothing but head hunting, keeping him in trim because it meant something to be his woman.

  “I don’t see the rest of the Trojans getting holy.”

  “How many Trojan cocks you seen lately?”

  “Their pussies ain’t pouting.”

  “Maybe heaven ain’t in their plans.”

  “How many virgins you been promised in that heaven?”

  “None but you.”

  Shadowboxing with his regrets in Ta-kome Pizza’s storage room, al-Saffah’s words again filled Mabi’s head. “There is an ancient rite,” al-Saffah had said, “a religious duty, one of the most important events in the life of a Muslim male. No male can enter heaven who has not undergone this rite. You must be immersed into the Mashriq ritual of circumcision. In simpler times, there was a festival. You would be dressed in special raiment, decorated with flowers and led around the village in a procession. Afterwards, there would be a feast and gifts, many, many gifts. Fathers would betroth their daughters as part of the ceremony.”

  Mabi recalled how al-Saffah had whetted a dagger with a watered steel blade against a pumice stone, the way it glowed and hissed, how he covered his groin, how al-Saffah’s eyes bored into him and pinned him to the couch and disconnected his hands from his mind so he himself undid his belt and opened his zipper and lowered his pants, how he laid back. The circle of scimitars rose from the wall above his head, rotated, faster, faster, a guillotine that would sever his head like a chicken being slaughtered if he attempted to stand. Something cool and wet touched his cock. Al-Saffah chanted words in a language he did not understand. Pain is ephemeral, was the translation, salvation eternal. Forceps, cold and metallic, clamped the tip of his cock, stretched his skin, held it taut. The slice, once, twice, a third time. He bit hard on the wooden dowel al-Saffah had placed in his mouth. How much he wanted to scream. At last, something soft cradled his cock, swathing it like a newborn freshly birthed.

  “Welcome you to your heritage,” al-Saffah said. “Let us pray for deliverance.”

  Supporting himself on al-Saffah’s shoulder, he limped to the prayer rug spread before the mihrab. The pattern of the prayer rug, diamonds whose different colors formed larger diamonds, mirrored the ceramic tiles of the mihrab. The glow of the glass mosque lamp hanging from the ceiling–delicate red inscriptions enameled into the neck, a blazon of blue bands, interlaced like snakes, Arabic inscription in gold leaf around the circumference, Syrian, first half of the fourteenth century–bathed the rug in a soft yellow light. Al-Saffah lowered him and faced him toward Mecca, then knelt beside him and forced him forward until his forehead touched the floor. Al-Saffah touched his forehead to the floor as well, then raised him to a kneeling position. For the first time al-Saffah called him Mabi.

  The pain between Mabi’s legs throbbed. Al-Saffah, the chess men, the scimitars, the dust of hundreds of pasts, all crowded in on him and, in the presence of so many old things, he felt newborn and nowborn out of the ashes of Leroy Wallaca, the ashes of Priam; newborn and nowborn out of the dust of Jim Ed; newborn and nowborn out of the hexes and hoaxes of Gideon, the silences of Hannah; newborn and nowborn out of the unknown into the known. He took a deep breath and willed away the pain and forced himself to bend forward until his forehead touched the floor. Yes, he thought. Mabi. Blood bought. A soldier in the army of Allah. As Mabi prayed, the pain between his legs subsided, disappeared, and with its disappearance he felt his being merge into the ancient artifacts surrounding him, merge into the chess set, merge into the sword and scabbard, merge into the mosque lamp, merge into al-Saffah, merge into the holiness of the book, and with this merger he immersed himself in the heritage, the history, the name he so badly wanted, so badly needed. If only Jim Ed were here to join me, he wished.


  That night, as Silvy pouted he said, “Maybe you don’t understand what growing up’s about. Leroy he’s a zero. Priam he’s a punk. Mabi he’s a man. There’s this book and everything going down be already written into it and every day we turn another page and read what’s up ’cept we don’t read it, but do it all at once if you know what I mean.”

  “I liked it better when you thought you was a comic book hero.”

  “I’m hero of a better book now.”

  “Is this in your book?” She reached for him and filled her mouth with him.

  Mabi, his cock swollen, still bleeding, pushed her away. “We be skipping sex ’til I heal up.”

  “How long?”

  “Two weeks, maybe three; then we fuck our brains out.”

  She rested her head on his chest. “I want to have your baby,” she said as they cuddled. “I don’t want him growing up with no father. I want you to stop gang-leading, stop jigging with al-Saffah. I want you to live regular and normal.”

  “Drugs too good a hustle.”

  “Al-Saffah he the source?”

  “You got brains behind that beauty. We his Boston outlet. He’s got gangs dealing for him in Chicago, New York, L.A., other big cities. Financing his crusade.”

  “You being Murphied, you know.”

  “Al-Saffah he’s no match for the Trojans.”

  “I know a hustle when I see one. Don’t be blinded by the green.”

  “Green’s like a traffic light, Silvy. It says when to go, when to stop. My traffic light it’s still green.” He held her tight that night, silent when she pressed him about fathering her child.

  Now, while Spider drove Badger home, Mabi hightailed it from Ta-Kome Pizza to confront al-Saffah. “No more missions for Badger no matter what’s written in that fucking book.”

  “Please. Among my people, our people, there is a ceremony of friendship.” Al-Saffah removed a hookah from the shelf over the Koran bookstand, lifted the bowl from the slender neck of its glass vase, and poured a quart of water from a silver pitcher into it. He inserted a piece of flexible tubing covered with woven cloth into a hole in the side of the vase. The tubing had a pipe bit at one end. He filled the pipe with tobacco, pinch by pinch, tamping it down with the flat end of a pipe tool. When it was full, he rotated the hookah so the stem faced Mabi and passed him a box of wooden matches. Mabi lit the hookah and drew the smoke through the water, inhaling deeply. The tobacco in the pipe bowl glowed.

  “You shall attend Bumper Sullivan’s funeral,” al-Saffah said. “The members of Capablanca will be there. Your absence will be noticed.”

  “Not as much as my presence.”

  “Your presence will not engender suspicions.”

  “What’s that mean? ‘Engender’?”

  “Make people suspicious. Make them think maybe you had something to do with Bumper Sullivan’s murder.”

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” Mabi reclined on his side and let the water-cooled smoke mellow him. The smoke rose in a column, collected under the ceiling, spread throughout the room until it hung like a fog bank. He wondered what the Jews had done to al-Saffah to make him hate so much. He wanted to hear about the scar on his face, the missing fingers. He imagined stories of torture and persecution. He felt at home with this man who hated as much as he did. The smoke eddied around the room, ethereal like a spirit at a séance. “Why Allah write Jew hating in His book?”

  “I do not hate. I believe. I believe in the missions written in the book and revealed to me, to us, through our actions. Hatred is irrational; but belief, true belief, is divine.” Al-Saffah scraped the ashes of the burned tobacco out of the bowl and cleaned the wet nicotine from the stem with a pipe cleaner, then refilled the bowl. “I do not hate Jews. I believe in the destiny chosen for me. For us.”

  Mabi’s soul bubbled like the water in the hookah. He never thought hating and believing could be brother and sister. To him, hating was hating and believing was for Sunday morning fools. He understood now that believing took the hate out of hating, made something positive out of something negative, something good out of something bad, something black out of something white. This was better than some book making a religion out of alibiing.

  Al-Saffah rose from his cushion and led Mabi to the prayer rug. “Come. Let us pray.”

  -9-

  Al-Saffah, Mabi now recalled, had demanded that Mabi send Badger on the mission to intercept Rabbi ben Reuben on the bridge over the Charles Street rotary. It is inscribed in the book, pre-ordained, al-Saffah had said. Despite Badger’s safe return, that night Mabi suffered another sleepless night in which Jim Ed appeared in his dreams speechifying on gates of ivory and gates of horn, blocking his path through the yellow, shoving him through the white. Morning brought no relief. At the top of Silvy’s shit list, now more than ever he felt the need to get Hannah to answer his questions. How? He couldn’t beat the answers out of her, nor flood her with dead presidents. Too much disapproval, too much disappointment, raged within her. She signified about the Trojans like a street corner preacher engaging in the dozens, calling him down, Spider, Scorpion, and everything he done since he shitcanned his birth name. Typical was, You need to get right with the Lord. Or, Leroy he’ll always have a home, but Mabi he never will. Or, If Leroy be dead, maybe the devil which stole his body should be moving on. Mabi endured these outbursts because of his need to have his questions answered.

  As bad as it was with Hannah, it was worse with Gideon. The last time he saw his old man was the previous January when he bought a round-trip bus ticket for New York on Gideon’s Greyhound. From Boston to Providence, they made small talk like distant cousins groping for a common background, discussing the weather, the Celtics, whatever. From Providence to New London, they reminisced about his childhood, birthday parties for himself or Jim Ed, their one and only trip to Boston Garden to see the Celtics because of the way Gideon was treated at the souvenir stand. From New London to New Haven, Mabi maneuvered the conversation to Gideon’s childhood, stabbing in the dark with questions about his growing up during the Depression; but Gideon responded with grunts, when he responded at all. As the bus entered New Haven, Mabi asked about grandparents, aunts, uncles, other relatives. Gideon’s silence shouted louder than loud. By the time the bus arrived at the New Haven bus station, their conversation had exploded into an argument which carried to the back of the bus where a nervous passenger begged a black Marine to intercede and make peace.

  “Say what,” the soldier said, coming forward. “Why you two boiling over?”

  “What kind of name Dillard Smitherman?” Eyeing him up and down, Mabi figured him for a chocolate chip likely to melt if the temperature warmed.

  “No cause for you to be dissing me.”

  “No cause for you to be butting in between my old man and me.”

  “He your boy?” Smitherman asked Gideon.

  “So he says. My real son a Marine like you. Died in the Nam. They never found his body. Buried an empty casket. Flags and shit, but no body.”

  “Sorry it so,” Smitherman said. “Just the same, this isn’t the place to be going ten. Lady in back real nervous. Afraid of a hijacking or something.”

  “He’s the hijacker.” Mabi gestured at Gideon.

  After the rest stop at the terminal, Gideon refused to let Mabi re-board, so he caught the next bus back to Boston, sulking in the last row like a child told he couldn’t have a piece of candy.

  That April, the April of Bumper Sullivan’s murder, Mabi had joined Hannah in her kitchen, ducking his head to avoid the frizzly chicken still hanging from the door jamb.

  “When you be tossing this?” he asked.

  “You got your superstitions. Your father has his.”

  He poured himself a glass of soda, then sat down opposite his mother. Hannah sipped a soft drink. She wore a cloth housecoat decorated with a faded floral design, its colors bleached out from years of washing. .

  “Don’t be waking your father.
He’s not driving today.”

  “When’s he ever going to take a hike from driving?” Mabi had tried convincing Gideon to quit the bus company, had offered to pay the bills; but Gideon said he’d pick cotton before living off drug money. Mabi played with a tear in the oil cloth covering the table. “You should be eating off fine white cloth.”

  “Won’t change the way the food tastes.” She stared over the rim of her glass at the place where the wall met the ceiling, ignoring him the way she ignored the hex bird.

  “That smelly thing not shielding you from nothing but company at supper.”

  “Smells sweeter than any perfume your drug money buys.”

  “It’s time you told me what Wallaca means.”

  “Since when Mr. Mabi caring ’bout that?”

  “Never stopped.”

  “Ask him.” She gestured toward the bedroom where Gideon napped.

  “You shamed we polluted with white blood?”

  “Not a drop.”

  “So why the vow of silence?”

  “What’s all the noise out there?” Gideon stepped into the kitchen, still stuffing his shirttail into his pants. “Our name it don’t mean nothing more than Smith or Jones. I could see a six-year old not understanding that, but a smart-assed gang banger like you?”

  “Gideon!”

  “Hush up, woman. This world it’s full of demons. Nothing helps demons more than a mouth too wide open.”

  “Nothing traps demons more,” Hannah said, “than a mind too wide shut.”

  “Speak on it, Momma.”

  “Nothing to speak on,” Gideon said. The doorbell rang. “Shut yourself in the bathroom.” He squinted through the peep hole and saw a whitey in a suit holding up a badge and a cop ID.